The travel and lodging industry has long relied on travel agents to direct consumers to their services. The Internet has changed the travel industry by providing a direct channel between the travel services provider and consumer. However, travel agents are still utilized in large part by the corporate travelers and those preferring the services of a professional travel agent to ensure that their vacation or business travel is planed thoroughly and that they are receiving the lowest possible rates.
There are a number of inventory management and distribution systems (IMDS) which have been generally adopted by the various products and services industries as standards for providing rate negotiation and distribution services to participating customers. In the travel industry, for instance, there exist four primary computer based travel IMDS', namely, Sabre, Galileo, Amadeus and Worldspan. While variations exist between the four major IMDS systems used within the travel industry, the underlying concept is generally the same in that a IMDS provides travel agents (known herein as brokers), corporate travel clients, and in some cases, individual customers with direct access to travel service provider rates and booking tools.
In general, a IMDS (or related system) provides brokers information to help negotiate discounts on behalf of their customers and with travel service providers with whom they would like to conduct business. A IMDS provides a travel service provider a means to attract repeat business from clients in return for a discounted rate. When a rate is negotiated, it is the responsibility of the travel service provider to enter the rate data into the IMDS. Due to human error as well as possible computer errors, rate data is often not entered correctly or is not properly recorded within the IMDS itself. As a result, customers may not receive benefit from negotiated discount rates.
One solution to ensuring that rate data has been entered and recorded correctly would be to manually audit a IMDS for inaccuracies. However, this can be a very time-consuming and expensive task, as there may be many hundreds or thousands of database records to examine. Therefore, a need exists for a system and method for facilitating a computerized scan of a IMDS database in order to flag suspicious and/or missing rate data.